Watching a full hockey game takes time. Breaking that game down for your players can take even longer.
You watch. Rewind. Find the right moment. Cut the clip. Go back to the game. Find another moment. Repeat.
Before you know it, you’ve spent two or three hours editing video instead of actually coaching.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A good hockey video analysis workflow should help you find the moments that matter, organize them, and quickly turn them into something your players can learn from.
Here’s how to break down hockey game film without spending hours editing.
1. Know What You’re Looking For
Before you start reviewing a game, decide what you want to analyze.
You don’t need to capture everything that happens. Start with one or two specific areas you want to focus on.
For example:
- Breakouts
- Forechecking
- Backchecking
- Defensive-zone coverage
- Offensive-zone play
- Zone entries
- Special teams
- Line changes
- Scoring chances
- Goals against
If you’re reviewing a game because your team struggled with breakouts, you don’t need to create 40 random clips.
Focus on the situations that help you understand why the breakouts worked or didn’t work.
This makes the entire process more focused and makes it easier to identify patterns across the game.
2. Capture Important Moments While You Watch
One of the biggest time sinks in video analysis is finding important moments after you’ve watched the game.
You watch the entire recording, remember that something happened around the 32-minute mark, search for it, rewind, find the exact moment, and finally create the clip.
Then you do it again.
CoachCut lets you do this differently.
When reviewing your recorded game footage in CoachCut, you can use custom keybinds to tag and capture important moments as you watch.
You can create keybinds for whatever you want to track and name them according to your coaching workflow:
- Good Breakout
- Bad Breakout
- Forecheck
- Backcheck
- D-Zone
- Power Play
- Penalty Kill
- Goal
- Goal Against
- Great Shift
When you see something worth reviewing, press the corresponding keybind.
CoachCut automatically captures the footage around that moment, giving you 7.5 seconds before and 7.5 seconds after the keybind is pressed by default.
So instead of writing down timestamps and searching through the game later, you can tag the moments while you’re reviewing the footage and have the clips ready to work with.
You can also manually adjust the capture time, giving you control over how much footage is included before and after each moment.
The result is a much faster way to go from a full game recording to a collection of useful coaching clips.
3. Use Keybinds to Organize Your Game
Your keybinds don’t just make clip creation faster. They can also help you organize your analysis.
Instead of finishing the game with dozens of unnamed clips, you can build your own system around the things you want to track.
For example:
Offensive
- Zone Entry
- Scoring Chance
- Offensive Zone
- Net Front
Defensive
- D-Zone
- Backcheck
- Breakout
- Turnover
Special Teams
- PP Entry
- PP Chance
- PK
- Faceoff
You can create keybinds around your team’s terminology and your own coaching priorities.
This means your game breakdown starts taking shape while you’re reviewing the footage.
You’re not just collecting random clips.
You’re collecting specific coaching situations.
4. Look for Patterns, Not Just Mistakes
It’s easy to build a video full of mistakes.
But one bad pass isn’t necessarily a problem.
If the same mistake happens five times in a game, that’s a pattern worth showing your players.
When reviewing your clips, ask yourself:
Does this happen repeatedly?
For example, you might notice that your team loses possession on several breakouts because the weak-side winger is too low.
Instead of showing every single example, choose two or three clips that clearly demonstrate the problem.
That gives your players enough context without overwhelming them.
5. Don’t Keep Every Clip
Capturing clips quickly doesn’t mean every clip needs to make it into your final video session.
After reviewing the game, go through the clips you’ve created and decide which ones are actually useful.
Ask yourself:
Does this clip help make a coaching point?
If the answer is no, leave it out.
If you captured ten breakout situations but only three clearly demonstrate the issue you’re trying to teach, use those three.
A shorter video session with five useful clips is usually more valuable than a 30-minute compilation that players have to sit through.
6. Show Good Plays, Not Just Mistakes
Video analysis can easily turn into a list of everything the team did wrong.
Try to avoid that.
If your team executes something particularly well, capture it too.
For example:
- A perfect breakout
- A good defensive rotation
- A smart backcheck
- A well-executed power-play entry
- A great scoring chance created through puck movement
Showing players what they did correctly gives them something concrete to repeat.
It also makes the video session more balanced.
A simple structure can work well:
Good example → mistake → good example
Players can compare the situations and see the difference for themselves.
7. Decide What You Want to Do With the Clips
Once you’ve finished your game breakdown, you have a choice.
Do you simply want to save or share the clips?
Or do you want to actually teach from them?
CoachCut lets you take either approach.
Export the Clips
If you’ve captured several useful moments and simply want the video files, select the clips you want and export them.
This works well when you want to:
- Share individual clips
- Build a highlight video
- Save important game situations
- Send examples to players
- Keep footage for later analysis
You don’t have to export everything you’ve captured.
Pick the clips that are actually worth keeping or sharing.
Present the Clips
Sometimes a raw clip isn’t enough.
You don’t just want your players to see what happened. You want them to understand why it happened and what they could do differently.
That’s where Present Mode comes in.
Once you’ve selected the clips you want to use, you can bring them into a video session with your players.
This could be before practice, before a game, or during a team video meeting.
Play the clip, pause it, and use the video as a teaching tool.
You can:
- Draw on the ice
- Circle a player
- Show where a defenseman should have moved
- Highlight an open passing option
- Draw movement or passing lanes
- Explain what the player should have seen
The goal isn’t to make the video look impressive.
It’s to make the coaching point easier to understand.
8. Add Your Voice to the Explanation
Sometimes drawing on the screen isn’t enough.
You want to explain what you’re seeing while the situation is happening.
With CoachCut, you can combine your drawings with voice recording to create an annotated version of the clip.
For example, you might pause a breakout, draw where you want the winger to move, and explain the decision while recording your voice.
You can then create a new clip with your explanation and send it to your players to review at home.
The player doesn’t just see the mistake.
They see the situation, your explanation, and the solution.
This can be particularly useful when you want players to review a specific coaching point before the next practice or game.
9. Keep Your Video Sessions Focused
You don’t need to show your players the entire game.
In most cases, a focused video session is much more useful.
Instead of:
“Let’s watch the second period.”
Try:
“Let’s look at five examples of our defensive-zone coverage from this game.”
You can then show:
- A good example
- A mistake
- Another good example
- A similar mistake
Now the players have a clear theme and can actually focus on what you’re teaching.
The footage supports the coaching point instead of becoming the coaching point.
10. Build a Repeatable Post-Game Workflow
The best way to save time is to make your process repeatable.
A simple CoachCut workflow can look like this:
Before reviewing the game:
Create keybinds for the situations you want to track.
While reviewing the footage:
Press the relevant keybind whenever an important situation happens.
Automatically:
CoachCut captures the surrounding footage.
After the game:
Review your captured clips and remove the ones you don’t need.
Then choose your workflow:
Export the clips you want to share, or prepare them for a video session.
For teaching:
Use Present Mode to draw on the video, explain the situation, and record your voice when needed.
Instead of:
Game footage → hours of searching → hours of editing → video session
you get:
Game footage → captured clips → select → teach
How Much Time Can This Save?
The exact amount depends on the game and how detailed your analysis is.
But the biggest time saving isn’t necessarily that you can edit a clip faster.
It’s that you don’t have to find the moment again.
The important moments are already captured while you’re reviewing the footage.
That means you can spend your post-game time thinking about the coaching message rather than searching through 60 minutes of video.
And that’s really what video analysis should be about.
The Goal Isn’t Better Editing. It’s Better Coaching.
A hockey coach doesn’t need to become a professional video editor.
You need to find the moments that matter, understand what happened, and communicate that to your players.
With CoachCut, you can create custom keybinds for the situations you care about, capture clips while reviewing your recorded game footage, adjust the clip length when needed, and organize your footage around your coaching priorities.
After the game, you decide what happens next.
Without spending your entire evening editing video.